The End of the Ice Age

By Terence Young

The End of the Ice Age brings together twelve tales of hardscrabble characters circling in their lonely orbits. These are stories of unfulfilled expectations, infidelities and small though ultimately meaningful victories that allow us to withstand greater losses. This could be Carver territory if it was not so obviously Young's world. These stories will linger with you for a long time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Biblioasis
• Release date: May 15, 2010
• ISBN: 9781926845135

Book preview

DREAM VACATION

STEVEN WAKES WITH A START. Someone is opening and closing the front door of their rented house. Whoever it is slams it shut only to open it and slam it shut again. Steven is thinking asshole. He is thinking prick. The fan above Steven turns at half-speed. It slices and dices the air, chopping up the breeze that comes in through a window that never closes because the hinges are rusted solid. They have rusted solid because nobody has ever thought to close the window. There is no need.

Shit, Steven says aloud, remembering where he is, the daily exodus of fishermen from the town, their noisy departure. How many times has he been fooled by the sound? Beneath his window, a parade of boats bounces by. He hears each Yamaha outboard climb to full throttle, pushing the hull from wave to wave with a loud percussive slap. Knock, knock. Hello. It’s six-thirty. God, his leg hurts. He lies back down and looks over at Nadine who is lying mummy-like, her hands folded across her chest, a sleeping mask over her eyes.

I can’t sleep, he says to the mummy, then waits.

From the courtyard, more sounds: Omar casting chlorine into the pool. Steven is hopelessly awake now, and the rhythmic hiss of granulated chemicals striking the water’s surface sounds exactly as it should. It must be the eighth day. Eighth day in the life cycle of disinfectants, antibacterial agents. Such an unnatural number. Steven can think of nothing that comes in eights. How hard is that to remember, a year of eights? It must drive Omar nuts. Marching to a different drum. Out of step with weeks, weekends, the whole freaking calendar.

During the first few days after he and Nadine arrived – when the idea of a Mexican vacation still seemed novel – Steven had got up with the sun, sat on the rocks above the surf and watched boys dive for lobster and huachinanga. He’d smoked and thought of artists who had made their way south to this beach in the fifties, imagined himself one of them. Just after six, Omar would make an appearance, he and Steven nodding and gesturing a kind of greeting, and Steven would watch as Omar trimmed the bougainvillea, skimmed the leaves that had blown into the pool during the night, checked the chlorine levels. Now, from his bed, he can picture Omar’s hand, the movement it makes as it sweeps out across the water in an arc. It is a motion Steven finds strangely attractive. The man could be sowing a field. He could be seeding a lawn. Steven supposes this is what Nadine would call irony. He listens. The crystals of chlorine break the surface tension with a whisper, a deadly sizzle that means no swimming for at least four hours. Steven looks up at the blades of the fan, the weak draft they produce a joke in the growing heat.

You woke me, Nadine says to the ceiling. She rolls onto her side away from him and pulls her pillow into her chest.

Mummy pissed off. Mummy mad.

What if I make you some coffee? Steven says.

Nadine slips the sleeping mask from her eyes and slides it back onto her forehead. Don’t be a hero.

What’s that supposed to mean?

You’d make coffee whether I was here or not.

Steven knows this is true, but he winces anyway to hear it. On another day Nadine would have played along. She would have sighed and said, Mmmmm, and requested something nice for breakfast, omelettes perhaps, or banana pancakes. Now her tone is ominous. It suggests grievance and anger and disappointment. Steven flips through the few scenes he can remember from the previous evening. Shooters on the deck, another sunset, some kind of meat on the barbecue. Two bottles of wine. Did he open a third? Then, only dim snatches. He’d offered a beer to the security guard. There was a party at the house next door, several women in high heels and bikinis. Had he said something stupid? Done something? His memory hovers above the scene like a video camera at a convenience store. Any minute now he expects to see himself stumble in, snap a G-string, lick a proffered breast. The tape rolls into darkness instead. Steven remembers falling, reaches instinctively to his plaintive knee. Shit. Nothing but blanks after that. Whatever happened, he knows sex is out of the question. At least for now. He rolls toward the window and throws back the sheet.

He says, There are a lot of things I might or might not do if you weren’t here.

You know what I’d like to know? Nadine asks.

Steven waits.

I’d like to know if you’d drink so much if I weren’t here.

Ah, he says.

Because I’d be very pissed off to find out you were being a shit just for my benefit, you know what I mean? I mean if I thought the moment I was out of your life you’d become a regular human being who didn’t cripple himself and throw up and bore the hell out of people with stupid stories about death, I’d be very upset. Fuck I’d be mad, you know?

People? Stories? Steven is intrigued and worried. What has escaped him this time? Best not to let on. Death is not a stupid story, he says. I worry about it.

That’s all I’m saying.

I’m making some coffee, Steven says. There’ll be a cup for you if you want any. He pulls himself from the thin cotton blanket that holds them both and walks directly out of the bedroom into the open-air courtyard that leads to the kitchen. He walks with what he hopes is an air of dignity, a posture that implies his disappointment in Nadine, her accusations, the reduction of his chronic anxiety to mere drunkenness. He takes a step and falters. His knee aches. He looks down to see a gash as long as a cigarette just above the kneecap of his left leg. There must have been more than a bit of blood, he thinks. The wound is clean, puckered a little, rimmed with Mercurochrome. It bothers Steven that he can’t remember who administered the first aid, but it doesn’t bother him enough to make him ask Nadine. The sheets will need changing, he tells himself, and he almost laughs out loud at the thought. He thinks of telling Nadine not to worry, that it’s just his period, part of his cycle. His life cycle. Christ knows, he’s bled enough for one lifetime. More, probably. A lot more. Once a month would be a relief. My life on the rag. My life as a rag. What do they call haemophiliacs? Bleeders? That’s me, he decides.

He looks out over the pool. "Hola, Omar, he yells. Como está? He makes no attempt to sound authentic. No burr in his throat, no rolling r."

"Muy bien, muy bien," Omar says.

"Mucho calor, si?"

"Si! Si!"

Three months and Steven still can’t carry on a decent conversation. What must the man think? These people! Broken crockery, blood on the steps. Steven shakes his head. At least Nadine is still speaking to him. Her mouth opens. Words come out. Things aren’t as bad as they could be. As long as she’s talking he knows he can wheedle her back into loving him again. A shower, some coffee. He’ll make an effort today. Go to the market himself for once, give the maid a break. Steven knows how to get there. They passed it in a cab on their way down from the airport. Maybe pick up some fish, a few prawns. Nadine loves good food, loves him when he cooks for her. He can feel the day turning in his favour. There must be a video store in this stupid town. An English video store. Steven starts to think about the dinner he will make. Soup, he’s thinking. Something with basil and oranges. Big chunks of fish, some scallops, maybe. And white wine. Easy, big fella, he tells himself. First things first.

It is a Tuesday morning in July. Large schools of dorado, mahi mahi and sailfish are moving north for the summer, and off the coast of Puerto Angel fishermen head out to sea in open fibreglass boats. Along the beach of the town boys drag plastic barrels of marine gas back to the ratty palm shelters they have erected for themselves and for the fishing guides, their employers, whom they have just gassed up and helped send on their way, some with clients, most without. Other boys lay out nylon nets for repair. Dogs return to the shadows of buildings and trees, their bodies folding in on themselves as the sun begins to heat the day. A late crew of three fishermen hefts a boat along log rollers across forty feet of sand to the water, and in a few minutes, they move out beyond the breakwater into the open Pacific.

Steven and Nadine occupy a rental home on the northern edge of the town, one of the whitewashed, fenced and gated gringo specials that a local realtor has made a reputation building: pool, palapa, patio. The three p’s of the Mexican getaway. This one was an internet bargain, something Nadine had come across late at night while Steven put the final touches on one of his wooden boxes: dovetail joints, recessed hinges, a bit of inlay. They were in the family room off the kitchen, a spring rain falling all over the Olympic Peninsula. The carpet around Steven was littered with wood shavings and a variety of cordless hand tools. At the end of March, a maintenance crew had cut down a large oak in the park bordering their property – something about fruiting bodies at the tree’s base, a hazard to the public – and Steven had pilfered a few heavy pieces from the pile they’d left to play carpenter. He’d spent a week sawing thin slabs from one of the larger rounds. These he fashioned into little gifts for friends: a jewellery box, a candle stand, napkin rings.

Aren’t you supposed to let wood season? Nadine had asked him when he first started sanding and planing the pieces.

Who has time for such things? Steven had said.

On the evening Nadine logged into the holiday website, Steven sat on the floor at her feet, rubbing his new creation with a mixture of linseed oil, beeswax and turpentine.

I should have a job, he said.

You have money, Nadine said. People with money don’t need jobs.

There’s something wrong with that kind of thinking.

Anyway, what would you do? You don’t know how to do anything.

You used to work. I could do what you did.

I phoned people and sold them things they didn’t want. Nobody likes to do that.

That’s not the point. You said I didn’t know how to do anything, but I could phone people. I could sell them things.

What I did was the same as doing nothing. That’s why people do it.

I have a degree in business.

And I have a degree in English, Nadine said. All that means is we’re both useless. What’s you’re point?

It was spring and the world was busy. Steven’s neighbours to the north had just cut their grass that morning, the first time since fall, and fruit trees were coming into bloom. All the activity in their rural subdivision made Steven nervous, as though he should be outside eyeing his gutters, grumbling about morning glory and the price of deck sealant. But Steven’s house was brand new. Its gutters sparkled. The deck was three interlocking rectangles of Oregon slate. A gardener killed any weeds with Round-Up.

Perhaps I could learn how to repair pianos, Steven said. He held up his box for Nadine to see. The lid had warped in the heated air of the house and wouldn’t close properly unless Steven pushed on it.

By the end of the evening he had agreed to submit a rental deposit online for the following fall – October and November, Christmas, too, if they liked the place. It was their first vacation together.

Steven sees something scuttle under the stove, another scorpion probably, and he reaches for a tin of perfumed bug spray from which he unleashes a cloud of lethal gas into the black wedge of space where the creature disappeared. He holds his finger on the nozzle until the can sputters and spits only air, until the kitchen reeks of sweet poison. Since he and Nadine first set foot in the house, Steven has emptied a case of these cans, killing centipedes, colonies of ants, giant moths and at least a dozen scorpions. Steven hates the scorpions more than all the other pests combined and sometimes will take particular pains to ensure these hybrid interlopers – he thinks of them as half crab, half spider – are dead. Right now, on the counter in a plastic bowl floats a very large specimen, one that Steven trapped miraculously the day before, and he leaves the stove to see what a good twenty-fours hours of treading water has done to the bug. On his way he grabs a fork from the pile of cutlery by the sink. The scorpion’s head and pincers lie submerged, but the wicked stinger remains aloft like a periscope, and when Steven prods the body of the scorpion, the fork produces a convulsion in the tail that makes Steven jump back. His heart becomes a sudden weight in his chest, a sluggish engine accelerating. Adrenalin